"The book’s top Amazon review, at present, calls it a 'raw dose of reality.' And it does reflect a hard truth: that Simmons and his ilk have succeeded in yoking the nihilism of the rock age to a policing, rapacious conservatism. 'I made a living spitting blood, sticking my tongue out, and being as grotesque and horrifying as possible,' he brags. Were it written in the present tense, it would be the truest sentence in the book."

Since we're already talking about psychopaths this morning, let me quote this too:

In its most confounding passage, “On Power” finds a model in Frank Underwood, from “House of Cards.” True, Underwood is a murderer, but he exemplifies a kind of can-do psychopathy that Simmons admires. “If you find psychopaths terrifying, it’s likely because they are the most effective at the evil they do,” he writes. “So I would ask you to seize this power for yourself. . . . Be a psychopath with a conscience.” There is no such thing, of course, just as there is no such person as Underwood; there’s only Kevin Spacey, whose abuses of power have left him in disgrace.

In its most confounding passage, “On Power” finds a model in Frank Underwood, from “House of Cards.” True, Underwood is a murderer, but he exemplifies a kind of can-do psychopathy that Simmons admires. “If you find psychopaths terrifying, it’s likely because they are the most effective at the evil they do,” he writes. “So I would ask you to seize this power for yourself. . . . Be a psychopath with a conscience." There is no such thing, of course, just as there is no such person as Underwood; there’s only Kevin Spacey, whose abuses of power have left him in disgrace.

Power itself may be amoral but it can be wielded for moral purposes or ends. Power will tend to corrupt even the most moral person, which is why ideally it should be kept ephemeral and diffuse by mechanisms such as hard term limits, various layers of oversight, and checks and balances and all that.

Power also has a natural tendency to coalesce over time. Over the past 240 odd years the United States Federal government has gradually gotten larger and more significant in the day to day lives of average citizens. There's a sort of inertia to the growth of government power that can be paused or slowed but is largely irreversible in any way other than extreme measures such as violent revolution.

Thanks for the link to your history in Chicago. In the early 2000's we would ride our bikes down south and turn around at the country club to head back north.

My wife's family are long-time Chicagoans from before the fire except on the near North Side. The neighborhood has met the opposite fate as yours. She recalls driving out to the suburbs in the 60's looking at houses but they never moved. Buildings would mysteriously burn down and cynics call it a Baird & Warner rehab. You could pick up brownstones in the 70's for $10,000 and fix them up with city loans at a nominal rate if you had the guts.

Now it's all bankers and titans of industry in homes worth many millions.